Saturday, 8 June 2013

I noticed that two of the postcards I'd got were almost identical but not quite:

I bought one from Spain and one from Portugal and neither of them had been used, so they must have been bought in the 1970s, from the look of the clothes, by foreign visitors to the city, kept pristine for decades, only to end up for sale online and bought by me.

It's not an earth-shattering event, these two shots taken one after another one bright day in Paris. Their serial numbers on the back are 104 and 105. I just very much like the fact that if you lay one on top of the other with some transparency, you can merge the two moments into one. Only the woman in the white mac on the left and the woman on the far right sitting on the wall are constants, The other people have moved on. It would be lovely to find other images from the same sequence of shots, but I doubt whether the postcard company needed more than two near-identical shots of the Eiffel Tower in a single period. But the two postcards taken together seem more than the sum of their parts.